This is a 27" x 39" Egyptian poster designed by an unknown artist to
promote the 1967 Salah Abouseif 111-minute black-and-white film The
Second Wife [az-zawget at-tania] starring Soad Hosny based on a
story by Ahmed Rushdy Saleh with screenplay and dialogue by Mohammad
Mostafa Sami and Sa'd al-Din Wahba and cinematography by Abdelhalim
Nasr. Plot summary: A village mayor [Salah Mansour] fancies a young
woman named Fatma [Soad Hosny] in his village. There are two
problems. First, his present wife Hafiza [Sanaa Gamil] does not want
him to take a second wife, and second, the young woman the mayor
desires already has a husband Abul-Eyli [Shukry Sarhan] with children
and they are a happy family with a lot of love for one another. The
mayor does not care about these things, because he is the corrupt bad
guy who already has a reputation for abusing and cheating his
villagers. He forces the young woman's husband to divorce her so she
can marry him, which he does, causing much pain and regret to himself,
his wife and his children. The mayor marries the divorced woman and
takes her into his home, but in a long series of comic evasive
episodes she contrives never to sleep with him. The mayor, who is
already sick, eventually dies. Fatma becomes a village hero for
standing up for the village people against the mayor in his schemes to
take their land and after the mayor dies she returns to her husband,
poor but happy. This is a social realist film with lots of accurate
detail about life in an Egyptian village, directed by the late
socialist director Salah Abouseif (1915-1996). The film may be
realistic for its details about village life, but Fatma's successful
evasion of the mayor's designs is probably not as realistic as the
film suggests.